Relatedly, Kidd and Garcia ( Reference Kidd and Garcia2022) demonstrate that 85% of this language acquisition research comes from authors based in North American and European institutions, with the United Kingdom being the second most prolific country after the United States. ( Reference Anand, Chung and Wagers2011) report that only ten languages account for 85% of the abstracts featured in 4000 leading psycholinguistic conferences and journal articles. Such is the weighting toward specific varieties from specific countries, that Anand et al. It is estimated that only around 0.6% of the world’s languages have featured in sentence production research (Jaeger & Norcliffe, Reference Jaeger and Norcliffe2009), with areas such as child language acquisition not being much higher at around 1.5% (Kidd & Garcia, Reference Kidd and Garcia2022). Psycholinguistic research has been complicit in this too, with a small number of languages from a small number of countries being vastly overrepresented in the field. By doing so, it is recognized that some human experiences are not universal, and findings from overrepresented subsamples cannot be generalized as being representative of the entire human population. The last decade has seen psychology research increasingly acknowledge the limitations of only researching WEIRD populations – that is, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich & Democratic (Henrich et al., Reference Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan2010). In doing so, this paper introduces a new acronym encouraging researchers to MIND their language – by developing more inclusive ways of capturing the linguistic experiences of MIND speakers, to move away from binary distinctions of “bilingual” and “monolingual,” and to recognize that not all varieties are afforded the status of language, nor do many multilinguals consider themselves as anything other than monolingual. Such factors include social prestige and language ideology, as well as linguistic distance. This position piece will provide a case study of one such variety: Scots, a Germanic variety spoken in Scotland, which is often considered “bad English.” However, its speakers display cognitive characteristics of bilingualism despite often regarding themselves as monolingual due to sociolinguistic factors. Yet even within WEIRD environments, the experiences of speakers of Minority, Indigenous, Non-standard(ized), and Dialect (MIND) varieties are not always captured alongside their use of a more prestigious standard language. While Psychology research in general has been criticized for oversampling from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations, Psycholinguistics has a problem with conducting a large amount of research on a relatively small number of languages.
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